I mean, there’s never a final way of living. You never get it all figured out. You’re always revising and tinkering. At least I am …

I’ve been beaten up by this head cold for so long I’m sick of being sick. I feel a bit better now (even if I can’t quite kick this tickly cough) and I’m desperate to get back into some kind of productive schedule. The twins dominate most of my day, but if my twinwatch is eight hours long, and I sleep for eight hours, WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER EIGHT??

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I strongly recommend seeing Anna Karenina in a theatre, but preferably a nearly empty one. Try for a matinee or a very late show, and try not to sit near anyone else — I don’t want other people’s whispered commentary (or snorts or sighs or gasps) to distract you from your own opinion of this curious film.

As you may have read in other reviews (and as you can somewhat see in the picture above) much of the story — including Vronsky’s horse race — is set in a theatre. This will either totally work for you or it may totally alienate you. I, for one, loved it. The stylized nature of the “society” scenes call attention to their rigidity and ridiculousness in a shorthand that I think Tolstoy would have admired. And watching Matthew Macfadyen — as Oblonsky — spin in and out of different coats as he marches in and out of different scenes was a choreographic pleasure all its own.

Since the twins were born — nearly 22 months ago — I’ve been living in the present. I can’t fret too much about what the future holds when each day is crammed with so many challenges and triumphs — both theirs as growing homo sapiens and mine as a mother and a writer. Many of my friends have praised this living-in-the-present, some even calling it a spiritual practice. That’s all been very nice — until I got sacked by a terrible head cold.

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About a month ago a friend and I were talking about a photograph taken at Grrls Meat Camp, a gathering where women spend a week learning how to butcher animals. The photo was of a woman butcher wearing a fleece, an apron and sunglasses gesturing to a beef hip. I made a joke about hipness — was she giving a lesson in how to handle a beef hip, or how to be hip while handing beef? This led to a discussion about the term “hip.” I had thought it was a neutral term, but my friend thought it was too close to “hipster,” which has grown to have more negative connotations. I debated this, and my jury was still out when I read this article in this Sunday’s New York Times: “How to Live without Irony.”

So if you, like some of the readers of my last post, were left unsatisfied by the book Life of Pi, you might want to try Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch.

Unlike Pi’s lengthy opening back-story, Jamrach’s Menagerie starts with a bang — and an encounter with a tiger — within the first few pages. Jaffy Brown, then eight years old, is running errands on the streets of London when he is swept up into the jaws of a tiger, (more…)

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The book Life of Pi has been out since 2001, but it’s taken me this long to finally read it. I remember it being quite popular and perhaps that was the reason (eleven less-mature years ago) that I resisted it. But I’ve started to become interested in shipwrecks, and I’m reading all kinds of books about them, and Life of Pi was on the list.

I fear that the hype around the book (from its early popularity to the forthcoming film version to its flap copy) has hurt my enjoyment of it. The flap copy reads:

A boy

A tiger

And the vast Pacific Ocean

If it had stopped there, I’d be keenly interested. But it continues: (more…)

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A bit about me …

I'm Randon Billings Noble, an essayist and book reviewer, who is also the mother of now three-and-a-half year old twins. I don't post here as much as I used to, but you can read my published writing and hear my writing news by clicking the link immediately below (which will take you to my writing website, randonbillingsnoble.com). Thanks!

I’m thrilled to announce that my lyric essay chapbook Devotional is out from Red Bird Chapbooks! This brilliantly decorated star fold book opens to expose a simple beauty and the experience of longing in a series of personal devotions, its brevity and contemplative prose evocative of a medieval Book of Hours. Each section of Devotional calls […]

I’m pleased to announce that my author talk, “The Sparkling Future, the Eternal Present,” is up at Superstition Review’s blog. In it I read an excerpt from my essay “The Sparkling Future” and discuss the power of seduction, the price of betrayal, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII, break-ups, beheadings, and what it’s like — as an essayist […]

It begins with a quote from the Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet — “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.” — and continues in 69 short numbered sections. You can find it here: “69 […]

I’m pleased to announce that I have two “Required Reading” columns in Creative Nonfiction: “A Story We Tell Ourselves and Others,” a review essay, Required Reading, Creative Nonfiction (May 2016) Here’s an excerpt: It’s often said that no one really knows what goes on inside a marriage except for the people who are in it—and I would […]